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by Tommaso Verderame, 16, Y-Press

Unarmed and lying face down on the ground with his hands behind his head, Oscar Grant was fatally shot in the back by Officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day in Oakland, Calif.

The chilling scene was recorded by onlookers and posted on YouTube; the video received hundreds of thousands of hits, bringing it to national attention. While hundreds of youth took to the streets condemning his actions, Mehserle resigned from the Bay Area Rapid Transit police force and was charged with murder.

While Grant’s story is an extreme example, youth across the country are rallying in numbers in pursuit of social justice. The issues they tackle run the gamut, from police mistreatment and racial profiling to high-stakes testing in high schools and college opportunities for undocumented students.

Growth

Karlos Schmieder is a communications strategist for the Center for Media Justice in Oakland, an organization that supports movements for racial equality and human rights issues. He has seen a substantial increase in such youth activism in those areas.

“They’re more and more getting involved, whether it’s on the Internet, doing Internet activism, or encouraging people to get out to vote like what happened in the last election. More and more we’re seeing young people volunteer at the community level everywhere,” Schmieder said.

City University of New York psychologist Michelle Fine also has seen increased activism. For the past 20 years, she has worked on educational and criminal justice issues, not only with youth organizers, but with youth researchers, too. She trains youth to identify issues most important to them and their peers and then teaches them to research those issues. Finally, after becoming familiar with their issues of choice, the youth present their findings to policy makers or community leaders and thus instigate real change.

She identified several key changes in youth activism over the two decades that she has been involved in it.

"I think youth activism has moved from universities to high schools," Fine said.  "There’s an incredible amount of organizing and critical work coming out of high schools."

She also notes that activism has become multigenerational as well as resource-blind, including not just white, privileged youth who join demonstrations on behalf of the common good but poor minorities who most often suffer on the front lines of social injustice. In the past, she said, different social groups rarely collaborated.

“I think it’s much more intersectional, that is, cutting across categories of race and class and sexuality,” she said.

Fine also noted that not only has youth activism grown in magnitude, it has grown more sophisticated and operates on a wider scale. 

"People are working both locally and nationally, and in some cases globally," she said. "So it’s operating at multiple levels, and that’s really very exciting. It's very powerful for young people to feel like they’re part of a national and sometimes international movement of youth trying to create change."

Assistance from technology

Both Schmieder and Fine credit a substantial amount of the rise in youth activism to the advent of mass media and social networking. For instance, the youth researchers who Fine works with have been able to conduct interviews online with populations that are hard to reach otherwise, such as foster care kids and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender youth.

“I worried about the Internet, privileging youth who were already privileged.  But actually our experience on this survey is it’s just not the case,” Fine said.

While the Internet is empowering to all kinds of young people, Schmieder emphasized that ultimately it is just a tool.

"I think people instinctively understand that pushing the button isn’t enough. We see young people out in the streets protesting, like here what happened in Oakland with Oscar Grant," he said. "We just saw young people coming out in the streets, maybe first connecting online, but actually doing the political action.  That is important as well and I think young people understand that."

Most pressing issues

Today, youth are passionate about a wide array of issues, according to Fine. Juvenile incarceration and police harassment have long been concerns, but youth are also now focusing on school-based problems, such as high-stakes testing, lack of rigorous curricula and limited opportunities for undocumented students.

Other efforts address sexual and safety issues. “Many of the LGBT youth are interested in advocating for drop-in centers and services for runaways," Fine said.  "There are campaigns for kids in foster care after age 18 and for violence against girls and women.”

But nationwide, probably the biggest target of social justice efforts is the treatment of youth by police, courts and corrections agencies. Just like the students who flocked to protests over the shooting of Oscar Grant, youth are turning a spotlight on instances of police brutality.

Fine said this is one of the biggest issues of the youth she works with. “(What’s) emerged in polling for justice is young people’s high levels of exposure to police harassment.  And we’re finding, mostly because the young people forced all of us to look at this, that exposure to police harassment, profiling and violence is highly related with feeling depressed, missing school, getting a criminal record,” she said.

A related issue is the large-scale incarceration of children. Liz Ryan, CEO of the Campaign for Youth Justice, a nonprofit that seeks to keep youth out of detention facilities, works tirelessly on behalf of incarcerated youth.

Ryan explained that many young people are arrested for status offenses (such as truancy and underage drinking), which are not crimes for persons ages 18 and over.

“What we’re seeing is that a lot of young people are getting detained in detention facilities and brought into the justice system for very, very minor offenses.  And in fact, they may have high needs. They may need counseling or educational support or job training or other things like that, but that doesn’t mean that they should be in a justice system, just because they have high needs,” she said.

Heeding the voices of youth

Fine said her young activists have had great receptions to their presentations and have seen real results. “People are very excited to see young people conducting research, analyzing research and then insisting on activism on the basis of research.  Parents and communities are usually very excited.  Sometimes administrators and policymakers are thrilled and sometimes they are quite annoyed,” she said.

But the power is not just in the findings but in the camaraderie of purpose that the activists have, she said. “The big effect really is breaking the silence about these issues, mobilizing multiple generations, not just young people, but young people, their parents, community and educators. And not allowing right-wing or racist policies to move forward unchallenged.”

However, a common complaint among young activists is that they are often overlooked or not always taken seriously. Schmieder has seen such paternalism directed at youth activists.

"Young people are both, as James Baldwin said, bold and maligned yet desired at the same time," Schmieder said. "Young people are both feared because of the way they’re portrayed in the news, but also people know young people.  They know their sons, their daughters, their younger cousins, the people who are on the block.  People want to instinctively protect them."

This dichotomy should resolve itself as more and more young activists take to the streets and cyberspace. "I’m super excited for young people, specifically the Hip Hop generation," Schmieder said. "The younger generation is a really media intense generation. They look at the world very differently.  They are more diverse, more progressive and open-minded than ever and more willing to look at a place of vision, of solution, and not be stuck on the problems and the politics of the past."

Reporter: Moira Corcoran, 12.